you take the good, you take the bad…

…and there you have the facts of ‘maters. The Terra Cotta is promising: full healthy plants with large clusters of fruit, slow to ripen. The Black Beauty had a great start, but the most mature fruit just rotted on the vine. The plant looks perfectly healthy. The San Marzano are prolific, even if the lower […]

today’s haul + flowers

After a heavy rain, I harvested the botched garlic crop (planted late) and hope to dry them some and replate this fall. What we got right this year are beets and carrots. some are still growing to size, but they are gorgeous! Additionally, the randomly scattered dill seeds (plus some volunteers from last year) were […]

what’s the ‘mater?

Overall our tomatoes are doing well. We are losing a few plants, but they put out a good round of fruit before they started drying out. The other plants are doing fine. This is the third time I’ve grown Black Prince, and each time they only get so far into summer before the plant shrivels […]

sowing autumn

I wanted two beds for fall harvest, and the beets and carrots are still going, so… I built another bed yesterday, picked up more topsoil to fill it today. I still have to clear the first bed of whatever garlic managed to grow (I planted it much too late this year), but I sowed the […]

what ‘maters most…

The tomato beds are just fine. Some voluteers are stunted, but every other plant is making up for it. August should be a good month for BLTs… or even GBLTs. 😂😂😂

rainy day snapshots

I have a long established habit of cropping out the mess. Who doesn’t, right? I have been noticing that doing so with the garden causes confusion in terms of layout/location. So, a break from that: These images cover most of our garden, in its various stages of growth and development, disarray and overgrowth.

dinner from the garden

Tonight, I pulled some carrots to check their growth. They are coming along nicely. I also pulled a clump of our Oriole Orange Swiss Chard. We have some gorgeous vegetables this year. The carrots and chard are both in the success column. They made a delicious dinner, sauteed in bacon fat with shallots, garlic, and […]

today, in the garden

Today is the first day of a four day holiday weekend; my first weekday off after returning to work at the start of May. We also had visitors to the garden; a lovely time, socially distanced with a couple we’ve seen only in a zoom social since the shutdown. Before our lovely visit, these are […]

“thai hot”

My husband is fond of hot peppers. Each year, they are a featured focus in our garden: habaneros always, plus random new experiments. This year’s experiments include two Thai pepper plants. They are covered in tiny white blossoms for weeks, and then nothing. Then I brushed aside some leaves while weeding and found a hidden […]

maters: new variety – black beauty

This gorgeous, fuzzy, frilly thing is what I’m assuming is a Black Beauty heirloom tomato. (I got my starts mixed up after sowing the seeds.) The tiny fruits have the longest sepals I’ve ever seen, thin and graceful. This was the last variety I’m growing to develop buds, but went into overdrive this past week […]